Big Lonesome

POPEYE SAILS AGAIN!

 

Way back in 2003, Black Warrior Review published my short story The Previous Adventures of Popeye the Sailor. BWR only features online content from their current issue so the story, which was briefly featured online, eventually was expunged from the Internet. (Archives of past issues of BWR aren't currently available online.)

This scenario is precisely what makes Fictionaut such a great idea. Fictionaut is a place where people can showcase short fiction. Some people use it as a place to put new work that they want to share with friends, who can give feedback and encouragement. Others post older, previously published work that isn't available online. It's still in the beta stage, figuring out what it wants to be, and it still has some quirks (for example, I haven't figured out how to delete a story), but the community is supportive and the layouts are clean.

In any case, I just posted Popeye over at Fictionaut. Why don't you give it a peep and say hello in the comments?

BOOK OF THE WEEK: NOW YOU SEE HIM

Now You See Him by Eli Gottlieb is a bedeviling book. Here's the story: A writer from a small town who rises swiftly to fame with the publication of a brilliant collection of short stories. That fame, however, is nothing compared to the media shitstorm that arises when the author, Rob Castor, shoots his lover and then himself. Though I tend to run from stories about writers, particularly moody-broody, prone to murder types, the suicide angle proved irresistible.

The novel is narrated in the first person from the point of view of Rob’s childhood friend Nick who, much like the small town where Rob is from and Nick still lives, is trying to move on from the tragedy, though not too hard and not too successfully. The storyline follows Nick as he navigates the aftermath and reflects on his childhood and on the dual tragedies. It's a great set-up, but there are so many things wrong with this book I don't know where to start.

1) Ostensibly, it's about a writer. Like most writers I know, I profess to hate stories about writers, but I still find myself getting suckered by stories about scribes hoping I'll stumble upon the next Barton Fink or Wonder Boys. The way Rob's achievements are glorified is almost embarrassing. Nick is like the geeky fan whose fanaticism ruins the fun for normal people.

2) Overwritten. Try this on for size: "The seasons passed, the leaves fell and in miraculous fits, in tantrums of green, they appeared again, and every day, Rob climbed to his desk like an exhausted swimmer battling the outgoing tide to the beach, and there tried to concentrate." Don't you feel a little embarrassed for Rob? Don't you feel a little embarrassed for all of us? And what do the miraculous tantrums of spring have to do with anything? I used this example to bolster my first point, but the book is littered with constructions like these. But just so that there can be no doubt, here's another one that caused me to actually launch the book across the room. "She laughed at me, but gently, and in a way that was so familiar to me it was like a touch upon the foundations of my soul." And where would that be exactly, the spleen?

3) Bad Dialogue. I'll allow that there's nothing wrong with much of the dialogue (or almost nothing wrong) but Gottlieb's sense of timing is completely off, like he has no idea how a real person would sound if thrust into the scenarios Gottlieb creates for his characters. I'm not going to cite an example because dialoge culled out of context can be made to sound foolish regardless of its author, but the lack of authenticity causes a deep mistrust for the individual putting words in their mouths.

4) Exposition of Convenience. Over and over again Gottlieb will tell us something that hadn't been mentioned before and, cognizant of the lapse, he'll launch into a set-piece of exposition and then never mention it again. He does this at several key junctures, like when he tells us that Christmas is coming. He also does it with plot points. He'll makes use of a minor character and then abandon her as soon as she fulfills her function in relation to Nick. One never gets a sense that the characters have a life of their own.

5) Unlikable Characters. It's one thing to have an unlikable narrator, but the whole cast of characters is made up of shitheels you wouldn't want to sit next to on a plane. The only character I liked was Nick's wife, but only because she lays into him with a savagery reminiscent of Carmela Soprano. If ever there was someone in need of the business, it's Nick. Even the "villain," the weasely childhood friend of Rob's who secures a book deal for an expose about his death, is more likable than Nick by a factor of ten.

6) Conflating Withholding with Suspense. The main surprise at the end of the book, the carrot that keeps the burro going, is not something that Nick uncovers or learns. It's something he knows on page one but chooses not to divulge. I myself have written stories guilty of much the same thing. Sometimes this is okay. This is not one of those times. Some narrators are decietful and duplicitous. You can't trust a thing they say. Nick, however, belongs to that species of supplicant who will tell you what he had for breakfast in excruciating detail, right down to the number of crumbs left on the plate, yet we have to slog through to the end to find out what he's known from the beginning. It just doesn't get any cheaper than that.

Yet, for all its flaws, for all its maddening excesses, I couldn't put the book down. As much as I bitched and moaned, I couldn't tear myself away. I was reading so intently that people would come up to me just to ask what I was reading. Then, when I reached the end, I was caught completely off guard, didn't see it coming at all. So I ask myself, was this a good book? Heaven's no. Was it a good reading experience? Absolutely. I honestly don't know what to make of this discrepancy other than to tip my cap to Mr. Gottlieb.

FIFTY-TWO STORIES

If a literary website enters the blogosphere, does it make a sound?

That's what the editors at Harper Perennial must be thinking woth the launch of Fifty-Two Stories. The idea, for the mathematically obtuse, is to publish a short story a week for an entire year. The stories will come, ostensibly, from new collections from Harper's authors and new re-issues from literary masters that Harper's will be issuing this summer, which they've dubbed the Summer of the Short Story. Interestingly, they'll also be publishing stories from Special Guest Stars and they're actually asking for people to send in their short stories.  

So what is it exactly? First and foremost, Fifty-Two Stories a promotional tool, but I'm willing to push aside my advertorial cynicism for a number of reasons:

1) They're running short stories in their entirety. There's really nothing to complain about there. You don't have to log on or register to access the stories and that's a good thing. And as long as Harper's doesn't start collecting email addresses sending out thrice weekly missives like another site devoted to the short story, they won't burn out their audience.

2) Fifty short stories is a lot. That's approximately four and a half collections worth of fiction, which is about a thousand pages. That's a not insignificant editorial investment.

3) Simon Van Booy. I touted his collection The Secret Lives of People in Love (Turtle Point Press, 2007) last year and I'm very much looking forward to Love Begins in Winter (though I confess the repetition of "love" makes me a bit uneasy for reasons I can't really explain) this spring. In fact, one of the stories, "The Missing Statues," is already up on the site.

4) It's an interesting experiment. Obviously, I'm invested in short stories so it's interesting to see all this interest in the form from a source that short story writers are told over and over again that mainstream publishing isn't interested in. Got that? Right now the site isn't particularly interactive. There's no place for comments except for an email address -- the same email address that readers are invited to use to send in their own stories. Will they be inundated with short stories? Will readers come and, if they do, will they return? Will it help foster a conversation about short stories? Will it help sales?

We'll see. In Van Booy's story "The Missing Statues," a young priest tells a sad man that he likes stories because "They help me understand myself better." I wonder what we'll understand 52 weeks from now?

BOOK OF THE WEEK: WARLOCK

I’ve wanted to read Oakley Hall's Warlock since I spied Thomas Pynchon’s endorsement in his introduction to Richard Farina’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, in which he reveals that he and Farina were fond of aping the book’s peculiar dialect. “We set about getting others to read it too, and for a while had a micro-cult going," he writes. "Soon a number of us were talking in Warlock dialogue, a kind of thoughtful, stylized, Victorian Wild West diction.” Pynchon’s influences are encyclopedic but this book seemed like an odd choice: a retelling of the story of Wyatt Earp versus the Clanton Gang in Tombstone, Arizona. This didn’t resonate with my reading of Pynchon at all – until Against the Day came out.

I finally tucked into Warlock this year and finished it last night. It’s an amazing work of fiction. The novel is set in Warlock but you can’t really call it a town – there’s no sheriff and every deputy who has pinned a star to his chest has either been run off or killed. It’s a desolate, lawless outpost of humanity that wouldn’t exist at all if it wasn’t for the nearby mines. Every so often cattle rustlers led by a renegade named McQuown ride up from San Pablo six hours away to raise hell. When the barber is killed the citizens decide enough is enough and send for a hired gun – Clay Blaisedell – to serve as Marshall.

As good as advertised with a pair of gold handled pistols given to him by a writer of cheap Western novelettes, Blaisedell restores order to Warlock, but it’s a species of order that is compromised by Blaisedell’s ruthlessly short-tempered companion, Tom Morgan, and complicated by Warlock’s newest deputy, John Gannon, a former member of the McQuown Gang.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The cast of characters in what Pynchon refers to in the jacket copy as an “agonized epic” is amazing: a one-legged alcoholic judge, a laudanum-taking doctor, a bad guy (a composite of Doc Holliday and Morgan Earp, Wyatt’s brother) who is a genuine sociopath, whores learning new tricks, anarchic miners, ruthless rustlers, lynch mobs out for rope justice, Apaches on the warpath, a piano player cut down in his prime, and an insane Cavalry officer who keeps the shaft of an arrow he was shot with in an leather case.

Hall’s masterstroke is the presentation of Blaisedell and Gannon: men who are neither good nor evil, but whose behavior vacillates between the two. These characters are incredibly complex, which puts Warlock head and shoulders above horse operas where the sheriff wears white and the bad guys always end up on Boot Hill. William S. Burroughs, no stranger to oaters, writes: “Some’s bastards, some’s ain’t. That’s the score.” Not in Warlock. This multiplicity of morals reflects the strange career of Wyatt Earp who was a champion to some and a villain to others, depending on where he was and when you happened to meet him. In other words, a true American hero. 

This brings me back to Pynchon; I’d like to point out some of the aspects of Warlock that might have influenced him:

1) CAST OF THOUSANDS: Warlock, we’re told, is sparsely populated, but in the course of the novel it feels like we meet every blessed citizen. When we’re in the company of McQuown’s gang or a congregation of striking miners, everyone is listed by name. Pynchon and Hall were both in the military and servicemen turned writers understand the lie of an intimate cast of characters who are together from boot camp until they die in each others' arms on the field of battle. The real world, especially the military, doesn’t work that way. The bane of your existence during 90 days of basic training may never be seen or heard from again and the guy you served with in Japan might suddenly pop up in San Diego ten years down the road. Compression is essential in movies, which get their structure from the stage, but Pynchon sees no need for compressing characters in his sprawling novels and he seems to have gotten that from Hall. In Warlock’s defense you need a big cast when dozens get planted in the ground. 

2) ON-THE-NOSE NAMES: From V’s Benny Profane to Against the Day’s Mia Culpepper (I didn’t catch the pun until I started listening to the audio book), Pynchon has never been afraid to saddle his characters with preposterous names. Sometimes the names are clues, other times ciphers, and much of the time they are jokes – both of the practical and private variety. The first person we meet in Warlock is Henry Holmes Goodpasture, who minds the general store and serves as Warlock’s moral compass. We meet men with colorful names like Curley Burne, Peter Bacon, Pike Skinner, and so forth. And can there be any doubt that the affections of a lady less than virtuous named Kate Dollar will come at a steep price?

3) “WARLOCK TALK”: Here’s a sample of the “thoughtful, stylized, Victorian Wild West diction” that fired Pynchon’s imagination. “I am not going to see him choused and badgered and false-sworn and yawped at fit to puke by a one-legged old son of a bitch like you!” Warlock is full of talk of “burned up peace officers” and “San Pablo hardcases.” I never thought of Pynchon as a writer who engaged in much regional (or temporal) vernacular, but it’s all over Against the Day. Again, this could be the result of listening to the audio book version, but the frequency and ease with which he slips into “thoughtful, stylized, Victorian Wild West” diction is startling. Pynchon pulls it all off because he uses dialogue sparingly and his narrators frequently end up sounding like Goodpasture:

“The earth is an ugly place, senseless, brutal, cruel, and ruthlessly bent only upon the destruction of men’s souls. The God of the Old Testament rules a world not worth His trouble, and He is more violent, more jealous, more terrible with the years. We are only those poor, bare, forked animals Lear saw upon this dismal heath, in pursuit of death, pursued by death.”

Sounds downright Pynchonese, doesn’t it? It’s almost as if Hall is channeling Pynchon’s Puritan forebears. I’m probably guilty of drinking the Kool-Aid of the micro-cult; nevertheless, Warlock is a fascinating read, if a bit on the long side, but worthy of your attention all the same.

SIX-WORD VALENTINE

I confess. I'm a hopeless romantic. So when I heard about Six-Word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak: By Writers Famous & Obscure I was compelled to contribute an abbreviated version of how I ment my wife.

Sirena wooed. Sailor swooned Man overboard!

The book is a fun and breezy read with contributions from lots of well-known writers. It's interesting what people choose to reveal about themselves. Some are paeons to new love (like mine). Others are cynical (like the majority). My favorites are those that are bittersweet.

You can read more about that fateful night at the H.M.S. Bounty (where I met Nuvia) here, but the picture below says it all.